What?! A Caveat to Working For Yourself?
If you work for yourself, you know there are lots of perks: a flexible schedule, setting your own salary, and outsourcing tasks you don’t enjoy, just to name a few.
However, for all of the benefits, there is one thing many business owners do NOT have, and that’s work peers.
What is a Work Peer? It’s someone with whom you share the same title/position/duties. A person who can truly relate to the day-in-day-out work that you do within your business because they do something similar (although maybe at a separate business or company).
For me, being a web designer/developer, my work peers are other web designers/developers, particularly those who work for themselves as I do.
A Happy Story … with an Even Happier Ending
I recently discovered that because the hosting company I use and recommend to my clients was making some technical updates, I needed to replace an important app in my workflow – and fast. There was just one problem. When I downloaded a highly recommended new app to replace my old one, I couldn’t seem to get it to work on any of my computers. After hours of troubleshooting, I decided I could use some help.
Enter my friend Ross, a fellow WordPress designer/developer. Ross and I have known each other for years and as a true veteran in the WordPress world, Ross is typically one of the first people I turn to if I need a second opinion or some advice. In short – he’s a work peer! And an awesome one at that.
When I reached out to Ross to see if he had any ideas for my predicament, he offered to hop on Zoom and work it out together in real time. In less than 30 minutes, we were able to get everything working and Ross showed me that with this new app, I could develop and launch websites a WHOLE lot faster. A few days later when I wrote to him exclaiming how much time I was now saving he said: “I know, it’s like getting a part-time clone of yourself.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
And the Moral?
The moral of this story, of course, is that without work peers like the one mentioned above, I’d have nowhere to turn to for help in situations like the one I described – not to mention I might not find out about sweet apps and tools that help me so much! Cultivating relationships with work peers – other people who do what you do – is deeply important and always worth the time and energy.
If you don’t currently have any, fear not, however. There are always opportunities to find them via conferences, Meetups, Facebook groups, and the like. With a little Google searching, you too can find your peers. So go find them! You never know when you might need them or they might need you. And, we are stronger together, every time.
